The political past

The New York Times and the liberal blogosphere have spent a fair amount of time lately discussing the legacy of Ronald Reagan--specifically, about a campaign speech he gave in 1979 that seems to have expressed solidarity with southern racists. Paul Krugman writes, "Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong." David Brooks, on the other hand, believes that "the truth is more complicated."

What struck me here is the contrast between how columnists like these analyse a historical event versus how historians would go about this. For people like Krugman and Brooks, it's an approach that my classmates note with disdain: a teleological one. This means, roughly, that they're starting with the end point and putting together evidence that leads up to that end. That end point is usually a political point for columnists, whereas historians are more likely to let readers infer the contemporary political connections on their own. Historians are concerned with how things might have turned out differently--in our terms, contingency.

Why is one stump speech Reagan made using coded political language for racism suddenly the topic of a flurry of debate? It probably has a lot to do with this year's campaign and republican invocations of Reagan, and very little to do with that speech's historical importance. To me, it's eerily familiar of what a superb Washington Post piece recently described as a debate about race in America that is "stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes." Columnists fixating on this speech in 1979 are doing just what historians try so hard to avoid: getting mired in the detail without figuring out the meaning and implications.

And so, for the final word on Reagan and race--and an example of what the historical method can bring to debates about the past's role in the present--I'll defer to another historian's take.